Gun sales surge ahead of US elections

In the first four months of this presidential election year, nearly 5.5 million legal firearms were purchased in the US, according to FBI data, while the candidates from both major parties have starkly different positions on gun control.

Vice-President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, advocates stricter regulations, while Republican candidate and former president Donald Trump is pro-gun rights. These contrasting stances are already resonating differently with likely voters.

David Liu, owner of Arcadia Firearm & Safety in Arcadia, California, serves a predominantly Asian community 30 minutes from Monterey Park, where a tragic mass shooting during a Chinese New Year Festival left 11 dead and nine injured last year.

"I'm a Trump supporter. And it's not because (Republicans) support guns that I vote for them. Because I look overall on the candidates. I prefer Trump's overall policy," Liu said. "I will not vote for a guy just because he said he supports guns. That's not the point of voting for the president."

Liu said that over the past two months, his sales have been slow, attributing it to a new 11 percent tax on gun sales and ammunition imposed in July by California's Democrat-controlled legislature to fund violence prevention. This is in addition to the existing federal tax of 10 or 11 percent on firearms.

About 16.7 million firearms were sold in the United States last year, a 4 percent decline from 2022, according to SafeHome.org, which analyzed the FBI's national instant background-check data.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation found that firearm sales to Asian Americans rose by 43 percent in 2020 compared with 2019, a response to a rise in hate crimes against the community during the pandemic.

The US has more guns than people, with estimates ranging from 425 million to 475 million in a country of 333 million people as of 2022.

A Quinnipiac University poll conducted in June found that only 4 percent of likely voters considered gun violence the most important issue in choosing a president, with the economy taking precedence.

Nearly half of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents own a gun, compared with 20 percent of Democrats and those who lean liberal, Pew Research Center found.

Carl Bogus, a law professor at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, told China Daily that the Republican Party considers the gun lobby to be an "essential" part of its political coalition.

Trump has called himself "the best friend gun owners have ever had in the White House". He told an audience in February at the National Rifle Association's Great American Outdoor Show in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, that "no one will lay a finger on your firearms" if he wins.

In his administration, Trump reversed a law that restricted people with mental illness to purchase a gun, and banned bump stocks that can convert semiautomatic weapons into a machine gun-like weapon. In June, the Supreme Court lifted the ban, citing the Second Amendment of the Constitution.

belindarobinson@chinadailyusa.com